Making our gadgets smarter

Are we getting closer to a world where our gadgets can not only talk to each other, but also to us? Researchers at the University of Technology in Sydney have joined forces with IBM to work on a new project to create an intelligent ecosystem that connects people, devices, technologies and the built environment. The research is part of the growing interest in the idea of 'The Internet of Things'.

Transcript

Antony Funnell: Some housekeeping matters now, and at the end of the show I always mention my co-producer, Andrew Davies. Well, this week, I'm going one step further; I'm going to introduce you to him. Andrew, say hello.

Andrew Davies: Hi Antony.

Antony Funnell: Now, you're here to tell us about the Future Tense glossary and also about why it's a good reason to follow us on Twitter. Am I correct?

Andrew Davies: I certainly am, yes. We were talking in the office the other day about our glossary and our Twitter account, and we mention them a lot on the show. But we thought it was probably about time we explained a bit more about what we do with them, and of course absolutely the most important thing, why they're worth following. If you haven't seen our glossary, it's on the right-hand side of the Future Tense web page, under 'Special features', and we created it a few years ago because we kept coming across interesting ideas and weird concepts, also, when we were making programs. So we thought it was a good place to put ideas and concepts and give people a sense of what they actually are and unpack them. So if you want to know more about a term like, say, gamification, you can go to the glossary to find out what it means and also find a link to some more information. And we just thought it's a fun way of keeping track of what we do and also some of the ideas that come up on the show. So if you get a chance, it's well worth checking out.

Antony Funnell: And the other thing we were going to talk about, Twitter?

Andrew Davies: We use Twitter I guess for three main things. And of course there are a lot of people out there who aren't using it, but we thought we'd give a quick overview of the three things we use it for, and probably most importantly, why you should absolutely be following us. And I guess the three things we use it for are; one, we let everyone know who follow us some of the things we're working on and also what's coming up on the show week to week. Number two, I guess we also Tweet interesting links to articles or videos we come across on the web that we think are worth looking at.

Antony Funnell: And we are also guilty, I have to confess, occasionally, of talking about the weather and coffee and other trivial things.

Andrew Davies: That's right, yes. I guess we can't always be interesting. The final thing we do on Twitter is we use it to stay in touch with everyone who follows us, and we've found that's a really great way, haven't we, of sort of getting direct feedback about what we're up to. And also for people to let us know about issues or ideas we should be working on. We've had some really great ideas over the last few years from some of the people we talk to on Twitter.

Antony Funnell: So there you are. What possible excuse is there not to follow us on Twitter? Our name on Twitter is RNFutureTense, all one word. And you'll find a link on the right-hand side of the Future Tense web page.

Okay, many thanks for that Andrew. Now, you can't go anywhere because you're the one who actually interviewed our next guest, Mary-Anne Williams, and it's a follow-up to a story we did some time ago about the Internet of Things.

Andrew Davies: We heard about some of the work that Mary-Anne and her team were doing, and we thought it was a great opportunity to talk to her on the show. Now, Mary-Anne is based at the University of Technology in Sydney, and they've just launched a really interesting new project with IBM where they're trying to make sense of many of the gadgets we use every day, make them smarter and, I guess, more useful. And research they're doing fits with this idea of the Internet of Things, which is where products and everyday objects have little, small chips in them so that they can be connected to the internet. Anyway, that's enough of me. Here's my chat with Mary-Anne Williams.

Mary-Anne Williams: We've been working with the Internet of Things at UTS for some time, and it turns out that the Internet of Things is the underlying key technology to IBM's Smarter Planet initiative, which seeks to make business smarter, cities smarter, cars smarter, everything smarter. And then ultimately the planet will be smarter. And in order to achieve this we need to connect devices, instruments, objects, so that we can communicate with them and allow them to collaborate and work together to achieve more ambitious goals.

Andrew Davies: So is it correct to say that with this research there's more focus, if you like, on the broader ecosystem and networks, rather than, say, just connecting individual objects to the internet, which was very much the original idea behind the Internet of Things.

Mary-Anne Williams: Exactly. So we want to exploit the fact that these objects are now interconnected. This project is what kind of information should we be transferring among these objects such that we achieve better outcomes, such that we're more productive, such that we enjoy our lives more and we're not sort of inundated with micromanaging small details and can focus on bigger, strategic, more interesting problems that we face at work and just in our daily lives.

Andrew Davies: It's a very big research area to cover. Can you give us some specific examples of research that you're going to be focusing on as part of the overall project?

Mary-Anne Williams: Well, our research is kind of coming under the banner of smarter living. So the objective is to create a social, smart ecosystem of devices and people in such a way that people's lives are enhanced. We've targeted four or five different technologies, which include a refrigerator, car, building, and a new robot that we're getting at UTS. And we're building a framework such that these devices will be able to communicate with one another. They will be able to ask each other what state they're in. So the car will be able to ask the refrigerator if the door is open or closed, and the refrigerator will be able to ask the car where it is right now. Is it parked near the office, is it going past a 7/11—things like that.

So the idea is that instead of having these devices and objects as stand-alone things that you can only use for a single purpose, we want them to work together so that we can actually do more, but also re-purpose them for more interesting tasks.

Andrew Davies: Speaking of those tasks, is it important then that the technologies you're focusing on with this research are very much everyday technologies rather than perhaps more cutting-edge ones?

Mary-Anne Williams: Yes, we think that there's a lot to be gained by just doing a lot more experimentation with the technologies we have today. Computer science is a very young discipline and it's produced lots of results that we haven't really exploited. And because Moore's law makes actual devices and hardware cheaper and cheaper, and with each change in magnitude of savings, that's transformative. So it allows us to explore in a totally new way using existing technologies, because we don't really understand the capability of the technologies we have around us already. And so this project is really designed to see what we can do with what we have right now. And we can do a lot more than we currently are. And that will also help us understand how to develop technologies for the future, and how we will manage privacy and security—at the same time creating objects that are just more useful, and in particular easier to manage so they don't require a high cognitive load to manage all of the technologies around you.

So in a standard person's briefcase, they may have several mobile phones, they may have a laptop, they may have an iPad—and that's just too much to manage. So we want to develop a framework that enables people to get on with the interesting part of life instead of micromanaging all of these devices. Cloud technology is one of the key technologies in bringing this ecosystem and this vision together, because somehow these devices need to be able to share information. But the design question is, okay, what information should they share, and how should we really manage that? And it's a very challenging problem.

Andrew Davies: And I guess one of those challenges in some ways is the balance, if you like, between making these technologies useful and helpful to us and not being disruptive or obtrusive, I suppose.

Mary-Anne Williams: Exactly. We don't know enough about how people interact with the world around them and devices and technologies to really design well. So you could consider this as a kind of requirements engineering project, where we want to explore and discover and track people's behaviour and see how it evolves over time. You know, if you're driving the car, I mean is it useful if your refrigerator contacts the car or emails you on your mobile phone to collect milk on your way home? Is it useful to customise a car to the driver in the sense of with each driver you may want to have different settings?

What if you had a car, a smart car, that could automatically adjust the mirrors to the person sitting in the driver's seat, instead of every time you have a change of driver you would have to more or less manually do that. When you sit in the same car you typically put the mirrors in exactly the same places, so it wouldn't take much effort for a machine-learning algorithm to learn your settings and also learn on the fly. It's not like they would be set in concrete, but they could change over time as your driving skills changed, et cetera.

And this may sound trivial, but we are moving into a world where people will be sharing cars more and more. There are businesses around today where people can share cars. And the idea that when you got into a car it was already customised to you as if it was your own personal car, you know that's kind of helpful. And you wouldn't want people just to jump in the car and drive off and then a pedestrian crossed the road and—oh, the brake is a bit further away than I thought it was going to be. So I think there's a lot of safety issues as well. This technology can anticipate some of the obvious things that we would have to spend time to fix or to address.

Antony Funnell: Mary-Anne Williams from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and she was speaking there with Andrew Davies.

Guests

Professor Mary-Anne Williams

Associate Dean (Research and Development). Director, Innovation and Enterprise Research Lab at the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology. University of Technology, Sydney

Further Information

Credits

Comments (6)

Trevor :

01 Apr 2012 12:12:51pm

Nothing like inventing what we already have.When BMW brought out their idea of a Rolls Royce in 2004 the technology of remembering each drivers settings was part of the package.When you sit in the seat , the car will greet you and ask you if you would like it to change the settings to suit you.It recognizes your voice, and your body weight, height weight distribution to guess who you are but it will also recognize your voce. It can be set to only start after it recognizes your voice or a pass word or pass word phrase, detect if you are drunk and alter speed according to speed limits.

I believe this technology is filtering down now through the entire BMW range from the most expensive down.

As for having appliances that communicate with each other they would do well to find a copy of an ABC tele movie from around 1978 called "The Door" .It was set in the future when your car could talk to your house which was wired into the network and evolves around the consequences of locking your keys inside your car.Oddly enough it also predicted things like privatized police forces and government departments that had to be self funding.

John :

05 Apr 2012 9:22:59am

When are we going to see video phones. A small device like a portable DVD player that connects to the internet with a built in webcam. Rather than have a big printed telephone book, you have the telephone directory accessible on line. I don't want to have to turn on the PC to use skype. I want a small device that can sit on the bench in the kitchen and not take up too much space. You can probably do that with mobile phones, although the RF bandwidth needed to stream video makes it impractical on a large scale and it's rather expensive.